Ploy Helps American Escape Lebanon

BOSTON — An American relief worker who was smuggled out of Lebanon by posing as a patient in an ambulance that carried him to Beirut Airport returned to Boston on Sunday.

``It was a 20-minute ride, but it seemed like 20 hours,`` Jim Yamin told a news conference shortly after arriving at Logan International Airport.

Yamin, 32, of Boston, a worker for the Grassroots International Group based in Cambridge, Mass., said he was driven Saturday along the same route that British cameraman John McCarthy used when he was kidnaped by terrorists last week.

McCarthy, 29, was abducted Thursday on his way to the Beirut airport to return to London. There is no word on his whereabouts or condition, police said.

Yamin said he thinks McCarthy may have been caught because he was accompanied by two escort cars and an armed guard.

``The precautions he took, having escorts, were probably his undoing. He probably drew attention to himself,`` Yamin said.

With the help of Lebanese humanitarian agencies with whom he has been working for the past month coordinating food, medical and job-training efforts, Yamin said he was put in an ambulance and whisked past three military checkpoints on the way to the airport.

The ambulance, which he described as a converted Volkswagen van with the name of the humanitarian agency Amel painted on the sides, made its way past the checkpoints with Yamin lying on one of its stretchers covered with a blanket, he said.

``My American passport was my death warrant if I was stopped by the wrong people,`` he told the Boston Herald in an interview published Sunday.

But he said, ``The militiamen would just glance inside and see there was a patient in back and just wave us on.``

``There used to be a distinction in Lebanon among certain Americans known to be trying sincerely to help the people, and there were those who were suspicious,`` Yamin told the Herald.

``There`s no more good American or bad American now. Every American is seen as the enemy,`` he said.

Yamin said he decided to make the trip with Amel workers because ``they are a well-known humanitarian group and they live with the (war) situation day to day and know what works and what doesn`t.``

Once he arrived at the airport, Yamin said he was able to board a commercial jet for London without incident because of the airport`s extensive security.